


Five Things that Surprise People about Clint and Phil's Relationship, and One (and a half) that Doesn't

by florahart



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Committed Relationship, Domesticity, M/M, shut up I like sap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 17:27:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6124465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/pseuds/florahart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Phil's relationship is not a secret, exactly, but there are things they don't really tell most people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things that Surprise People about Clint and Phil's Relationship, and One (and a half) that Doesn't

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently I was experiencing a need for domestic fic. 
> 
> If you think there are things that ought to be tagged, holler, and as ever, feel free to point out typos if you notice any and want to.

That Clint and Phil are a couple is not a secret within SHIELD. They refer to each other as partner, because neither of them is a fan of the teasing that comes with any of the other options – “lover,” while accurate, is off the table because it sounds like something someone would say in a bad eighties hot-tub scene, and “boyfriend” somehow is hilarious even though of course, no one ever thinks it’s weird when anyone refers to a civilian relationship in exactly the same way. Clint tells Phil it’s that everyone is jealous of him for getting to tap Clint’s ass, and Phil tells Clint it’s because everyone knows that Phil is in his late forties and has not been a ‘boy’ for a long damn time; they both know it’s mostly that they’re effective, lethal badasses that can make even above-average lesser criminals piss their pants without breaking a sweat, and no one can quite wrap their heads around their general tenderness they actually do bring out in one another even though they see it in non-operational settings all the freakin' time. Which, both of them are pretty firm in their belief that this is everyone else’s problem, and not theirs, so it’s mostly just funny.

They _could_ use “fiancé,” since despite that they haven’t really discussed it, they have every intention of getting hitched eventually, someday, probably post-retirement when they can be little old men together giving no fucks about anyone else’s opinions all day long. But they don’t, because if they did everyone would want to talk about when, and just, no. That’s between them, and just because the relationship is known doesn’t mean they aren’t private about a lot of things; they are, after all, in the business of spying and covert operations.

So anyway. The relationship, within the confines of the agency, is not a secret. It’s not explicit in anything they release outside their servers because they don’t want anyone to actively help anyone get the (stupid, probably fatal, definitely annoying, ultimately ineffective) idea that a way to get to one of them is to kidnap, kill, maim, or frustrate the other; however, on and off the clock, they are a team, and everyone who works with them knows it, and knows they’ve promised each other that such a plan _would_ be ineffective. Still, there are a lot of things that surprise people about their relationship, if and when they find themselves far enough into the inner circle to know.

 

**One.**

The hardest part about moving in together was finding a kitchen Clint can live with in an apartment that doesn’t run them the net worth of a Caribbean nation. Everyone always thinks this was Phil’s issue, having a giant freezer in next to the stacked washer/dryer and a ton of counter space, but that’s always been Clint. Phil spent his twenties and thirties perfectly happy to just stop at the SuperMart and grab a couple of microwavable single-serve lasagnas when he got back from far-flung corners, but Clint put his foot down. He can make better (qualitatively, quantitatively, nutritionally, yummaliciously) stuff to put in the freezer, and he fucking loves Phil, thanks, and so he wanted broad counters and an array of freezing trays and gleaming stainless pots and pans to use in his crafting. Seriously, who wants Stouffer’s when they can have homemade? And if it’s speed of preparation they care about, hey, he can always call Nat -- or Hill, or until he fucking betrays everything, Jasper, or in a pinch Marcos from R&D (who is a giant nerd but takes Clint seriously every time he offers up a criticism of his tech, and who is also kind of a low-end foodie himself) – to get something out and toss it in the oven while they’re en route.

Phil was just humoring him, at first, and he knew it (but let him, because let’s review: love), but after they got back from a nasty and unfunny impromptu tour of the Amazon basin, both of them underweight because when there’s a supply problem and the water isn’t that safe, no food is better than dying of, like, stomach plague, sure, they stopped at HQ first and got hydrated, and Dr. Anguiwe arranged for them to quickly get the bland food they needed first during a very annoying overnight stay. But after that, when they got home at two the next afternoon to a hot pan of a sweet-potato casserole with just a little bit of a salty, creamy sauce and a variety of green stuff and white beans cooked in, he may have come to see the value.

Or at least, Clint’s convinced by the way his eyes closed after the first bite that he’d rethought his opinion of shitty-but-fast as a culinary positive.

 

**Two.**

If they are out and about on a Saturday afternoon – or really, _any_ afternoon that is not because they’re working – it’s because Phil got antsy. Clint is pretty much a cat, in many ways. He’s particular about whom he trusts. He’s acrobatic and lands on his feet despite a string of fairly shitty life events (earlier, and occasionally continuing). He’s flexible and likes to perch on top of things. And also, he is entirely willing to curl up in a spot in the sun and take a nap seventeen minutes after getting out of bed in the first place. If it’s up to him, he stays home a lot, but Phil likes to do things outside, like run and play Frisbee golf and go to Ikea. 

Clint doesn’t _mind_ any of that, because he likes making Phil happy and it doesn’t hurt that following him on these adventures not only brings a smile that lasts into the evening, but also the opportunity to trail around ogling his ass all day, but left to his own devices, Clint’s Saturday top ten includes topping up the frozen casserole supply; binge-watching pretty much any procedural produced by network or cable TV in the last thirty years; reading whatever’s new in Amazon’s hard sci-fi catalog (yay Kindle); and breaking down and reassembling the components of his weapons cache one by one (okay, the weapons cache surprises _no one_ ; Clint keeps eleven handguns, six throwing knives, two bows, a _cross_ bow, and a good old-fashioned shotgun in the place, and that’s before you get to the stuff that’s locked up. All but two of the handguns are well-hidden, but every one of them is easily accessible).

Phil, on the other hand, requires activity, and where he goes, Clint follows. 

Okay, fine, maybe he’s also part dog.

Phil, fortunately, isn’t unobservant, and tries to keep it to three or four hours out, then heads home and lets Clint direct some high-quality cuddling and/or homebodying.

 

**Three.**

Clint is a shower hedonist. He has more scrubs, soaps, lathers, foams, creams, and body washes than anyone else maybe ever. He stays in the shower for 45 minutes if he doesn’t have to be anywhere, with the spray turned up to as hard and as hot as it will go. He also has loofahs and sprays and assorted colognes, gels, mousses, sugars, and the like.

However, except for the people who have the privilege of grabbing a whiff of a post-shower Clint on such a day, smelling like vanilla or cinnamon-ginger or mangoberry shampoo (this is a short list; if they get a call to go even half an hour after he’s out of the bath, he generally takes the more hurryup-typical two-minute shower and uses basic soap-smelling soap and ordinary plain deodorant that won’t smell noteworthy in a confined space or a casual meeting), _everyone_ at SHIELD thinks all that stuff belongs to Phil.

Phil used to smell like plain soap, too, but when he started openly dating Hawkeye, he started sometimes smelling like Clint’s various goops and goos because he’s not that good before coffee and showering at Clint’s place had led to grabbing any of the variety without a lot of contemplation. And just a couple of weeks later, Wendy Carvalho had asked who smelled like candy.

Phil knew Clint had legitimate work reasons for re-showering when he did, but he was also just about sure he wasn’t ready to tell the entire agency how much he loved smelling pretty and feeling soft – not that he’d verbalized any such thing. So, he’d just shrugged and said he liked to keep Clint guessing.

And then he’d started making a point of using the stuff that smelled sugary or fruity or occasionally spicy.

He doesn’t know if Clint knows he does it on purpose, but they both enjoy when they let people into their lives a little more for the first time and a newbie gets a load of Clint’s scent of the day.

 

**Four.**

The locked room at the end of the hall is not the secured weapons room, nor is it a home office with files and secrets in tall cabinets with drawers or encrypted hard drives and password-protected directories. It has nothing to do with operational or physical security.

The locked room at the end of the hall is where Clint keeps his art supplies. There’s a little darkroom in there, where Clint develops film and makes prints (yes, still. Old-school. His camera is ancient and decidedly non-digital; everyone and their brother can click on the picture button on an iPhone and apply an Instagram filter but Clint’s work isn’t like that).

Sometimes this is what he does while Phil runs or Frisbees; more often he goes out at night, when Phil is on assignment or working late, and snaps roll after roll of images on film, black and white with care for focal distance and exposure time. 

Sure, sometimes whatever he clicks away at turns out to have, later, some kind of relevance to a plan, because many of his favorite targets are fundamentally architectural: poles and fire escapes, parapets and high windows, garrets and high wires and antennas that sit atop flat roofs and sloped peaks. So sometimes, yes, he goes back to a picture to consider how to use such a place as a perch. But this is not their purpose.

He also paints, watercolors of fantastical scenes; these he reproduces sometimes for sale, but mostly they’re for no other reason than to lose himself in swirls of color and to watch the way the thin paint travels on the page.

He sells prints under an assumed name, which Phil helped him set up along about the same time as they remodeled the room; before that he’s sometimes set up at a fair or sidewalk thing and collected some cash, but now he’s gone kind of legit with it. This part surprises him, too, so it’s totally fair that overall, the hobby would startle pretty much everyone. Hawkeye uses his hands to kill people, after all.

 

**Five.**

They have sex on the job a lot. A. Lot. Everywhere. 

This wouldn’t surprise _some_ people; Fury in particular has given up on the assumption any surface either of them has been near is sure to be free of butt germs, but the broader SHIELD contingent would be both alarmed and impressed, because the list of where and what is hilariously comprehensive.

Clint doesn’t give a shit about professionalism in this regard, because he thinks fraternization rules in general (discrete from harassment rules, that’s not the same at all) are fucking stupid and because he’s kind of a hornball most of the time. Phil does give a shit, but also knows from long experience that sometimes SHIELD careers come to a quick and/or ugly end, and as previously noted, he’s in his late forties. He plans to make every single memory he can, just in case the retirement-and-marriage plan fails to come to fruition.

So, yeah, they’re careful about leaving anything sticky anywhere wildly inappropriate, mostly, but if it’s a safehouse they’ve been in, or a briefing room, or an area behind some kind of screen, or twice a supply closet and twice also in a cockpit (when this is called to his attention somehow, probably by Nick, Phil offers as defense that these were all early in the relationship, while they were still eager. Correction: _more_ eager.), or once, very memorably, in the medical wing in a room on the other side of the curtain in which was Felix Blake, more or less asleep but not unconscious because he’d refused narcotics for his shattered clavicle? If it’s any of those places, there has been sex. Phil justifies to himself that because they both really like sucking cock, they do clean up after themselves pretty well. 

Clint justifies to _him_ self that they just both really like sucking cock. And that it’s good for very occasionally someone to surprise them in the act. Keeps everyone on their toes. And makes Phil blush in way that almost always leads to even better sex later on, so, bonus.

In any case, those close to them know not to assume a table in a room in which they were left alone is a good place to set a bagel, and if the custodial staff in areas they frequent all have extra containers of pre-wetted clorox wipes, well, that’s good for everyone’s hygiene, right?

 

(And then, there are things that might surprise people, but really never do, once they know Phil in the first place.)

**+One.**

The throw on the back of the couch, a bright chunky thing made of loose cotton-acrylic yarn in several shades of purple with a bright yellow meandering stripe here and there and a sky-blue border section, has a dozen places where it’s been repaired, to better and worse effect, after the weave came loose. It’s been with Clint since his third year in the circus, and was thrown out and left behind in the mountain of trash when they suddenly pulled up stakes and abandoned him at sixteen. 

Clint likes to think that as shitty a brother as Barney was, maybe at least he left him that to find, left him this one comfort object. It’s probably not true; it was probably just that they chucked all his stuff, less to pack up and carry. Still, he likes the notion and does nothing to disprove it as the throw continues to get more ragged with each passing month.

Phil hates the damn thing, but he fucking loves Clint, okay? It’s ugly as shit, but there is basically nothing anyone could do to get him to throw it out.

**and a half.**

Until he meets a girl working on her MA at Culver in fabric arts. When she mentions a hobby of disassembling old sweaters to knit new stuffed bears and lions and so forth, he asks if she can make a hawk out of a blanket. Clint gives his blessing, and while they’re in Kuwait for a week-long op, she takes the blanket and makes The Amazing Knit Hawkeye, who lives in the rocking chair except when Clint brings him to the couch. The replacement blanket is also eye-searingly purple, and Phil hates it, too. But he still fucking loves Clint.


End file.
